The Progress Toward Retrieving the Tribal Experience of Cavemen

The printing press revolutionized the world, but Gutenberg's invention isn't revolutionary only because it succeeded in spreading knowledge around the world; it is important because of the way it changed social behavior. Over the course of time, Gutenberg's printing press became a mass market invention, capable of producing enormous quantities of small volumes that could be ready anywhere. Books belong to the industrial revolution in the same way that computers belong to the technological age. They reflect the fragmentation of society that took place during this era. The industrial revolution fragmented society by displacing them from agricultural and agrarian ways of life that had been the norm for families for centuries. Books reflect this fragmentation in the way that they can be read anywhere. Prior to industrialized production of books, readers were incapable of enjoying their books in isolation. Books served to further the division of the population brought about by the industrial revolution. But if books were a way of sharing and gaining information, this ability to enjoy them in isolation contributed to the collapse of the old tribal ways that kept society a collective entity throughout history.

Since pre-history, humans seemed to have possessed an innate and instinctual drive to bond and share. Cave drawings present a view of early man gathering together to share information; the contemporary image is one that has these ancestors sitting around a fire and swapping stores. Whether that image has any relevance to actual fact is not nearly as important as the fact that is typically accepted uncritically. Our willingness to accept the image of cavemen gathered around a fire telling stories may say more about ourselves than it does about our knowledge of prehistoric man. The opening sequence of the 1980s TV anthology series Amazing Stories made the connection concrete by showing the progression of storytelling from cavemen around a fire to audiences sitting in front of a television.